Is a god who orders the killing of his children a monster?

[_maklelan]

I apologize for having promised to leave you all alone only to return again to the fray, but there are people on this board who make it worthwhile to keep at it. My question addresses an issue brought up by one Duwayne R. Anderson. You're probably aware that his work has been reviewed by FARMS. There's a thread about it on the MAD board. I began to read the review and was struck by the inconsistency that catalyzed this gentleman's apostasy. He says he was annoyed by the Lord's command to Moses to kill. After brooding over it he says this:

I finally decided that I simply had two choices. On the one
hand, I could accept the story as written, and conclude that
Moses was doing God’s will. In this case, I would be forced
logically to reduce God to a butchering monster. My second
choice was to retain my concept of a benevolent God, full of
goodness and virtue, and conclude that Moses was either a
false prophet or that the historical record had been seriously
corrupted.

I'm aware that many agnostic and atheist (and many believing) people feel the same way about this issue. The question is a common one: How can a God who purports to love us and be good command someone to kill? Some people, in their quest to find an answer, make this problem a lot more difficult than it has to be. I'd like to provide an explanation that helps to aleviate the concern and puts such an action in its proper moral context. My thesis statement is basically that there was absolutely nothing wrong with God commanding Moses to slaughter others.

One gift from God that he has said he will never take away from us is our agency. Good and bad people alike will be allowed to do as they please for a long time yet to come. In allowing this agency, God places his people in interesting circumstances, and sometimes his commandments take into account the social and political contexts in which his people live. I believe his commandments to kill from the Old Testament come in a surprisingly common context from which we are too far removed to fully appreciate. We retroject our 19th, 20th, or 21st Century ethics into a time period when those ethics are quite literally useless, and here's why:

Imagine you live in 2nd Millennium BC Mesopotamia. You live in a small village along the Euphrates that barely eeks out a living from its agriculture and the sporadic trade caravan passing through. A far off village has grown because of nearby natural resources and is growing beyond its capacity to feed itself. This growing city has begun to pillage neighbors to be able to feed its growing population and maintain its capacity for specialization (a carpenter or bronze craftsman doesn't have time to grow crops for his family, so he's got to trade with someone who does. When all your people are craftsmen, who's gonna grow the crops?). The pillaging is getting closer and closer to your village, and you've got to militarize or be destroyed. You have a problem, though. Your farmers can either grow food for your village or they can fight, but they can't do both. You have weaker neighbors who have plenty of food. What do you do? Your choices are to 1) try to negotiate, 2) let your town and all its people be destroyed, or 3) militarize and destroy your neighbors and take their food. Negotiating is absolutely out of the question. You have nothing to offer them except for your food, and why would they trade when they can just kill you? A market economy will not exist for thousands of years, and not even the Greeks could figure out that helping the other guy will ultimately help you. Negotiating is out of the question. Letting your town get destroyed is absolutely out of the question. You only have one option, and that option was played out thousands of times throughout the ancient Near East for centuries. In the ancient Near East you can be a jerk or you can be dead. Today it's easy to turn the other cheek. Generally our pride is the worst thing that gets hurt when we do, but back then if you turned the other cheek you died. Period. Moses was commanded to kill because leaving competing cultures thriving as you try to squeeze into the land in the Near East was not a possibility.

My conclusion is this: today killing another group of people is bad, but 3,500 years ago it meant your kids got to live, and your head didn't end up as decoration in some guy in Mari's garden. If you think God's a monster for having ordered the death of others then you're left with a loving God who prefers your death, because he's not gonna save your butt from absolutely everyone else in the continent just because you want to be the bigger person. A rudimentary understanding of the ancient Near Eastern socio-political context makes the apparent contradiction in the morality of the Old Testament God utterly disappear.

Your thoughts?

[_harmony]

It's not the ones that God supposedly commanded Moses to kill that bother me. What bothers me is the one he wasn't commanded to kill, but he did it anyway, then hid it, and then ran away. And this is the man God chose to lead his people out of bondage? Thou Shalt Not Kill... and yet the man God delivered those commandments to had already unjustifiably killed a man with his bare hands?

No, the Old Testament is a layered mass of myth, edited by men with a particular agenda, passed down from generation to generation with a particular goal in mind (preserving the tribe at all costs), and with each passing, adding another layer, and moving another step away from the truth.

The stories themselves have value, as insights into ancient customs, as interesting artifacts, but as arbitrators of truth, of God's will for mankind? No more than Aesop's Fables.


Oh, and welcome back, maklelan. You were missed.

[_maklelan]

It's not the ones that God supposedly commanded Moses to kill that bother me. What bothers me is the one he wasn't commanded to kill, but he did it anyway, then hid it, and then ran away. And this is the man God chose to lead his people out of bondage? Thou Shalt Not Kill... and yet the man God delivered those commandments to had already unjustifiably killed a man with his bare hands?

But there was no real law at that point.

Oh, and welcome back, maklelan. You were missed.

Hey, I appreciate that.

[_guy sajer]

I apologize for having promised to leave you all alone only to return again to the fray, but there are people on this board who make it worthwhile to keep at it. My question addresses an issue brought up by one Duwayne R. Anderson. You're probably aware that his work has been reviewed by FARMS. There's a thread about it on the MAD board. I began to read the review and was struck by the inconsistency that catalyzed this gentleman's apostasy. He says he was annoyed by the Lord's command to Moses to kill. After brooding over it he says this:

I finally decided that I simply had two choices. On the one
hand, I could accept the story as written, and conclude that
Moses was doing God’s will. In this case, I would be forced
logically to reduce God to a butchering monster. My second
choice was to retain my concept of a benevolent God, full of
goodness and virtue, and conclude that Moses was either a
false prophet or that the historical record had been seriously
corrupted.

I'm aware that many agnostic and atheist (and many believing) people feel the same way about this issue. The question is a common one: How can a God who purports to love us and be good command someone to kill? Some people, in their quest to find an answer, make this problem a lot more difficult than it has to be. I'd like to provide an explanation that helps to aleviate the concern and puts such an action in its proper moral context. My thesis statement is basically that there was absolutely nothing wrong with God commanding Moses to slaughter others.

One gift from God that he has said he will never take away from us is our agency. Good and bad people alike will be allowed to do as they please for a long time yet to come. In allowing this agency, God places his people in interesting circumstances, and sometimes his commandments take into account the social and political contexts in which his people live. I believe his commandments to kill from the Old Testament come in a surprisingly common context from which we are too far removed to fully appreciate. We retroject our 19th, 20th, or 21st Century ethics into a time period when those ethics are quite literally useless, and here's why:

Imagine you live in 2nd Millennium BC Mesopotamia. You live in a small village along the Euphrates that barely eeks out a living from its agriculture and the sporadic trade caravan passing through. A far off village has grown because of nearby natural resources and is growing beyond its capacity to feed itself. This growing city has begun to pillage neighbors to be able to feed its growing population and maintain its capacity for specialization (a carpenter or bronze craftsman doesn't have time to grow crops for his family, so he's got to trade with someone who does. When all your people are craftsmen, who's gonna grow the crops?). The pillaging is getting closer and closer to your village, and you've got to militarize or be destroyed. You have a problem, though. Your farmers can either grow food for your village or they can fight, but they can't do both. You have weaker neighbors who have plenty of food. What do you do? Your choices are to 1) try to negotiate, 2) let your town and all its people be destroyed, or 3) militarize and destroy your neighbors and take their food. Negotiating is absolutely out of the question. You have nothing to offer them except for your food, and why would they trade when they can just kill you? A market economy will not exist for thousands of years, and not even the Greeks could figure out that helping the other guy will ultimately help you. Negotiating is out of the question. Letting your town get destroyed is absolutely out of the question. You only have one option, and that option was played out thousands of times throughout the ancient Near East for centuries. In the ancient Near East you can be a jerk or you can be dead. Today it's easy to turn the other cheek. Generally our pride is the worst thing that gets hurt when we do, but back then if you turned the other cheek you died. Period. Moses was commanded to kill because leaving competing cultures thriving as you try to squeeze into the land in the Near East was not a possibility.

My conclusion is this: today killing another group of people is bad, but 3,500 years ago it meant your kids got to live, and your head didn't end up as decoration in some guy in Mari's garden. If you think God's a monster for having ordered the death of others then you're left with a loving God who prefers your death, because he's not gonna save your butt from absolutely everyone else in the continent just because you want to be the bigger person. A rudimentary understanding of the ancient Near Eastern socio-political context makes the apparent contradiction in the morality of the Old Testament God utterly disappear.

Your thoughts?

If the morality of killing is entirely situational, then why make it one of THE 10 Commandments?

There are too many instances of where God himself killed (Flood, prior to visit to Americas) or where his proxies killed at his behest (Saul being commanded to kill every man, woman, beast in a rival city—what the hell does killing children have to do with law of survival?), or his chosen killed on their own (Elijah kills opposing priests, Elisha calls out bears to kill children who made fun of him) to make a complete mockery of the Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

God doesn’t obey his own laws, why should we?

The God of the Old Testament is a murdering, psychopathic b*****d. If he were made flesh, he’d be considered a sociopath, wrapped up in a straight jacket, and sent away to a dark, dank cell to spend the rest of his worthless days. That or he’d end up with a needle in his arm.

The God of the Old Testament personifies all the bad, petty, vindictive, evil personality traits that Christianity condemns so vigorously in others.

Why spend one’s life kowtowing to a psychopath, particularly an imaginary one?

[_maklelan]

If the morality of killing is entirely situational, then why make it one of THE 10 Commandments?

The commandment is actually about murder, not about killing. The Hebrew distinguishes between the two, and none of God's commandments use the same word as the one used in the decalogue. From a linguistic and cultural point of view, these are two entirely different things, and killing is not a part of the ten commandments, murder is.

There are too many instances of where God himself killed (Flood, prior to visit to Americas) or where his proxies killed at his behest (Saul being commanded to kill every man, woman, beast in a rival city—what the hell does killing children have to do with law of survival?), or his chosen killed on their own (Elijah kills opposing priests, Elisha calls out bears to kill children who made fun of him) to make a complete mockery of the Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

And you obviously don't understand it the way they did back then. You commit the error of equivocation, but in this day when people don't bother to look at ancient history from any perspective other than from a middle-class american perspective, it's to be expected.

God doesn’t obey his own laws, why should we?

God does keep his own laws, but when you reduce everything to black and white and refuse to understand it in the context in which it was developed you create a framework that cannot possibly be accurate.

The God of the Old Testament is a murdering, psychopathic bastard. If he were made flesh, he’d be considered a sociopath, wrapped up in a straight jacket, and sent away to a dark, dank cell to spend the rest of his worthless days. That or he’d end up with a needle in his arm.

That's a fine assertion, but all the evidence you have shown to arrive at that conclusion is wrong. You refuse to think outside a 21st century box. How can you ever expect to judge an action from the second millennium BC?

The God of the Old Testament personifies all the bad, petty, vindictive, evil personality traits that Christianity condemns so vigorously in others.

And if you lived in that time period you and everyone who thinks like you would have their skins hanging from the city wall. Your morality is utterly useless in that context. To insist that modern ideals can and should be retrojected into a civilization that survived literally only because of intimidation is idiocy.

Why spend one’s life kowtowing to a psychopath, particularly an imaginary one?

Again, a nice assertion with nothing to back it but your own indignation.

[_Quantumwave]

My conclusion is this: today killing another group of people is bad, but 3,500 years ago it meant your kids got to live, and your head didn't end up as decoration in some guy in Mari's garden. If you think God's a monster for having ordered the death of others then you're left with a loving God who prefers your death, because he's not gonna save your butt from absolutely everyone else in the continent just because you want to be the bigger person. A rudimentary understanding of the ancient Near Eastern socio-political context makes the apparent contradiction in the morality of the Old Testament God utterly disappear.

Your thoughts?

The main problem with this kind of discussion is people tend to overlook the obvious.

Harmony nailed it when she said;

No, the Old Testament is a layered mass of myth, edited by men with a particular agenda, passed down from generation to generation with a particular goal in mind (preserving the tribe at all costs), and with each passing, adding another layer, and moving another step away from the truth.

The fact is, these stories were handed down ORALLY from generation to generation for CENTURIES before being written down. Very few facts, if any at all would survive. This “God” character was invented by the Hebrew scribes out of ignorance of natural causes earlier in the Old Testament and then conveniently used to provide an alibi for their ancestor’s murder and pillaging during their conquest.

The wars of conquest probably happened, but the activities of their “God” character in perpetrating murder and mayhem was a complete fabrication which appealed to their elitist world-view.

To argue these points is tantamount to arguing about the validity of activities of Alice In Wonderland.

[_guy sajer]

If the morality of killing is entirely situational, then why make it one of THE 10 Commandments?

The commandment is actually about murder, not about killing. The Hebrew distinguishes between the two, and none of God's commandments use the same word as the one used in the decalogue. From a linguistic and cultural point of view, these are two entirely different things, and killing is not a part of the ten commandments, murder is.

There are too many instances of where God himself killed (Flood, prior to visit to Americas) or where his proxies killed at his behest (Saul being commanded to kill every man, woman, beast in a rival city—what the hell does killing children have to do with law of survival?), or his chosen killed on their own (Elijah kills opposing priests, Elisha calls out bears to kill children who made fun of him) to make a complete mockery of the Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

And you obviously don't understand it the way they did back then. You commit the error of equivocation, but in this day when people don't bother to look at ancient history from any perspective other than from a middle-class american perspective, it's to be expected.

God doesn’t obey his own laws, why should we?

God does keep his own laws, but when you reduce everything to black and white and refuse to understand it in the context in which it was developed you create a framework that cannot possibly be accurate.

The God of the Old Testament is a murdering, psychopathic bastard. If he were made flesh, he’d be considered a sociopath, wrapped up in a straight jacket, and sent away to a dark, dank cell to spend the rest of his worthless days. That or he’d end up with a needle in his arm.

That's a fine assertion, but all the evidence you have shown to arrive at that conclusion is wrong. You refuse to think outside a 21st century box. How can you ever expect to judge an action from the second millennium BC?

The God of the Old Testament personifies all the bad, petty, vindictive, evil personality traits that Christianity condemns so vigorously in others.

And if you lived in that time period you and everyone who thinks like you would have their skins hanging from the city wall. Your morality is utterly useless in that context. To insist that modern ideals can and should be retrojected into a civilization that survived literally only because of intimidation is idiocy.

Why spend one’s life kowtowing to a psychopath, particularly an imaginary one?

Again, a nice assertion with nothing to back it but your own indignation.

Does the absurdity of your position strike you? You’re trying to construct an argument justifying killing and/or murder from a religious point of view.

You realize, do you not, that outside of your apologetic framework, the rest of civil society would consider your arguments equally as absurd as I do?

(As an aside, I wonder if I killed someone and then tried to argue that, from a Biblical point of view, it wasn’t really murder and was justifiable, whether this would fly?)

What is it about religion that makes what appear to be normal, reasonable persons like yourself try to justify what you would condemn in any other context?

While we’re at it, was God’s killing of every man, woman, and child in the flood murder or killing?

Explain to me why the children deserved to die, please.

Do you agree, then, that death is justifiable punishment for non-belief?

Do I deserve to die like those in Noah’s time?

Who should kill me? You? God? Would that be murder or killing?

Whatever the standards were in the Old Testament times, I hold God to higher standards, not bound by the ignorant cultural traditions of pre-modern societies. If man was solely responsible, that’s one thing, but this is man killing/murdering as God’s agent, and it is God himself killing/murdering. This tells me enough about God not to believe in him and to conclude that he is, as portrayed, a psychopathic b*****d. (What else to you call someone who kills millions of men, women, and children in a hissy fit because they aren’t subservient enough to him?)

[_harmony]

I HATE THAT! (I just lost another post to the cyberspace monster).

One more time:

The Old Testament is a collection of stories that ancient men used to try to explain what happened in their lives. A flood that kills lots of people? God did it because man was so evil. A lunar or solar eclipse? God ate the sun. People die and it's not fair? No problem... God just took them home. People get sick from eating inadequately cooked pork? God says to not eat pork.

The Old Testament is simply man trying figure out the unknowable, and what they came up with is: God did it, God said so, God... God... God...

Now, we know many more answers than they did, so our questions list has shrunk, and we think some of their answers are weird, strange, or downright pathelogical.

[_CaliforniaKid]

Hi Maklelan,

My belief is that if it's kill or be killed, the gospel calls us to be killed. Particularly where women and children would be the object of our killing. Did I mention that the Israelites invaded Canaan, and were therefore the aggressors in this genocidal narrative? I cannot in good conscience justify that. Can you?

Blessings,

-CK

[_Hally]

Yes.